Public screening and conversation with Professor Peter Limbrick, author of Arab Modernism as World Cinema (2020).
Presented by the Film and Digital Media Department, the Center for the Middle East and North Africa, and the Center for Documentary Arts and Research.
Date: Tuesday, November 19, 2024
Time: 7:00pm
Location: Communications 150 (Studio C)
By request, please wear a mask to this event.
In her directorial debut, Mary Jirmanus Saba deals with a forgotten revolution, saving from oblivion bloodily suppressed strikes at Lebanese tobacco and chocolate factories. These events from the 1970s, which held the promise of a popular revolution and, with it, of women’s emancipation were erased from collective memory by the country’s civil wars. Rich in archival footage from Lebanon’s militant cinema tradition, the film reconstructs the spirit of that revolt, asking of the past how we might transform the present. FIPRESCI International Critics Prize Winner at the 2017 Berlinale Forum. – Malgorzata Sadowska.
Mary Jirmanus Saba is a geographer who uses film and other media to explore labor movement histories, connections among unstable landscapes and legacies of colonialism in the Arab World, Latin America and Turtle Island and the ever-present resilience of everyday life. Her debut feature film A Feeling Greater Than Love (2017) premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival Forum where it received the FIPRESCI International Critics Prize, making several “Best of 2017” lists. From 2006-2008, she produced the community broadcast television program, Via Comunidad with art collective Vientos del Sur in Ibarra, Ecuador. A avid producer of anonymous and collective agitprop, her lateset film Mahdi Amel in Gaza (2024) is screening in community spaces, protest sites, and sometimes festivals. Saba is a member of UAW Labor for Palestine, the People’s CDC and a UC Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Santa Cruz in Film and Digital Media